You can run a customer portal on Salesforce without Experience Cloud. Build it on Salesforce Sites, keep your customers as Account and Contact records instead of Salesforce users, and enforce who sees what in Apex. That’s how the SF Custom Portal Template and the SF Support Portal Template work, and both include an AI assistant out of the box.
Why does the license bill grow with every customer?
Experience Cloud makes each portal member who signs in a Salesforce user, and each of those users needs an Experience Cloud license. Salesforce sells these as member-based licenses, assigned to a specific person, or login-based licenses, counted by logins each month. Either way, your cost depends on how many members you license or how often they log in.
That puts a price on the one thing a portal exists to do: get more customers to help themselves. Public pages that guests see without signing in are handled differently; this post is about signed-in access to a customer’s own records.
How does the assistant answer from your own content?
Both templates include an AI assistant that answers from your own content rather than the open internet: published FAQs and knowledge in the Support Portal Template, and knowledge, documents and Salesforce records in the Custom Portal Template. A customer asks in plain language and gets an answer before they open a case. Next to it sits a searchable knowledge base and a public help center, so answers are there at 2 a.m. too.
The assistant runs on your own LLM provider key. BYO Key here means your API key with a provider such as Anthropic or OpenAI, not the Bring Your Own Key feature in Salesforce Shield Platform Encryption. You choose the model, you pay for inference directly, and conversations sent to that provider fall under your contract with them.
If you’d rather stay inside Salesforce, the Custom Portal Template can switch its assistant to Agentforce with one setting. In the Support Portal Template, the same knowledge and FAQ content can also feed an Agentforce Service Agent.
How does it work without external users?
The portal is a React frontend served from a Salesforce Site. When a customer logs in, the portal checks their credentials against their Contact record. Members are Contacts, not Salesforce users, so you don’t create a new Salesforce user for each member.
Access is decided in Apex. Every request goes through server-side methods that verify the member’s Contact and Account and apply the template’s permission sets before returning a record. A customer only sees their own company’s cases, orders and documents, and what they can do with them depends on the permission sets you give them. These template permission sets are separate from the native permission sets Salesforce assigns to User records. We’ve used this model on production customer portals since 2019.
There’s no external database and nothing to sync: portal records stay in your Salesforce org. When a customer uses the BYO Key assistant, the question and the relevant content go to the AI provider you chose.
As with any architecture, confirm the licensing fit for your contract with your Salesforce account team.
How does this compare with headless approaches?
Salesforce Multi-Framework external apps run through an Experience Cloud site. Public pages there can use guest access, but customers who sign in need Experience Cloud licenses. A React app hosted outside Salesforce doesn’t need Experience Cloud, but you then own the hosting, the sign-in and the integration back to Salesforce. These templates keep the frontend, the data and the access checks in your org.
Who owns the portal code?
You do. For the Custom Portal Template, the React and Apex source is delivered to your org as an unlocked package. Fork it, extend it, white-label it. There’s no recurring platform fee and nothing phones home.
Day-to-day changes in the Custom Portal Template don’t need a developer. Branding, modules, layout, dashboards and which objects appear are set from one admin panel that saves instantly, and any standard or custom object can become a secure list, detail and edit page. A guided setup wizard takes an empty org to a branded, working portal in days.
When should you license Experience Cloud anyway?
If your team wants to build and rearrange pages themselves in Experience Builder, or you depend on features that only exist for Experience Cloud users, license the users. If your customers mainly need to log in, see their own records and get answers, a template like this is worth comparing first.
FAQ
Do portal members need Salesforce user licenses?
Members are Contacts, not Salesforce users, so you don’t create a Salesforce user for each one. Confirm the licensing fit for your contract with your Salesforce account team.
How is member access secured?
Apex verifies the member’s Contact and Account and applies the template’s permission sets before any record is returned, so each customer sees only their own company’s data.
What data goes to the AI provider?
Portal records stay in Salesforce. When a customer uses the BYO Key assistant, their question and the relevant content are sent to the AI provider account you connect.
Can the assistant use Agentforce instead?
In the Custom Portal Template, yes, with one setting. In the Support Portal Template, the same knowledge content can feed an Agentforce Service Agent.
When is Experience Cloud the better fit?
When your team wants to build pages in Experience Builder, or you need features that exist only for Experience Cloud users.
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SF Custom Portal Template
A blank-canvas portal starter kit — customer, vendor, or internal portals. Any object, any use case, your brand.
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